Review: A Sense of Place

This little gem had been collecting dust on my bookshelf for nearly a decade before I finally got around to reading it. I’d found it by accident on a sunny morning in San Francisco, bought it with the best of intentions, then apparently decided it needed nine or ten years to mature properly.

A Sense of Place is a travel book about travel writers talking about travel writing. Meta enough to disappear up its own backpack, but fortunately it never does.

Michael Shapiro travels around the world meeting some of the great names of the genre, usually on their own turf. This turns out to be a smart move. The writers seem unusually relaxed, perhaps because Shapiro approaches them less like a journalist hunting for quotes and more like an enthusiastic pilgrim arriving at the shrine.

Shapiro clearly regards some of these people as minor deities. That could easily become unbearable, but instead it gives the conversations an intimacy they probably wouldn’t have had if conducted by some bored reporter with twelve prepared questions and a flight to catch.

He meets Isabel Allende at her mansion near San Francisco. One of my favorite books by Allende is Paula, her devastating account of her daughter’s illness and death. Shapiro’s own father had recently died, and what might have been another polite literary interview becomes something considerably more honest: a conversation about death, grief and memory.

The title of the book emerges from his discussion with Allende about what actually creates a sense of place. Not merely geography or a collection of monuments checked off before lunch, but things as smell, texture, temperature, color. The things guidebooks tend to ignore because apparently “the pavement smelled of hot garbage and diesel” doesn’t sell many package holidays. History matters. Geography matters. Topography matters. But so does the way a place feels when you’re standing in it.

Shapiro also visits Tim Cahill at his cabin north of Yellowstone. I first encountered Cahill through a battered copy of Road Fever that I bought at Shakespeare and Company in Paris, which is almost suspiciously perfect as travel-writing anecdotes go. In Road Fever, Cahill describes a long drive from Tierra del Fuego to northern Alaska, an expedition that ended up in the Guinness Book of World Records. Because apparently driving across two continents wasn’t sufficiently unreasonable without paperwork to prove it.

Then there are Bill Bryson and Paul Theroux, two writers who could hardly approach travel more differently. Bryson, famous for making inconvenience, confusion and minor personal humiliation extremely funny, describes himself as something of a spy. He claims he isn’t particularly good at interacting with strangers, so he watches instead.

Theroux has the opposite talent. He can apparently start conversations with practically anyone, anywhere. In The Great Railway Bazaar from 1975, even endless train journeys become populated by fascinating characters. Put Theroux in a railway compartment for twelve hours and he emerges with three stories, a political argument and the complete biography of the man sitting opposite him. I’d emerge with a stiff neck and half a packet of peanuts.

Interestingly, Theroux in person sounds every bit as sarcastic as the man inhabiting his books. Bryson, meanwhile, comes across as remarkably pleasant. One suspects that if you were trapped in an airport overnight, Bryson would make you laugh about it. Theroux would probably explain, in exquisite detail, why the airport represented everything wrong with modern civilization.

Arthur Frommer tells the wonderful story of how his first guidebook came into existence. At 24 he was drafted into the US Army and sent to Germany. Whenever he had leave, he traveled around Europe using night trains and free military transport, seeing as much of the continent as possible while presumably spending very little money. Those experiences became The G.I.’s Guide to Traveling in Europe in 1955. It was an immediate success and eventually led to the Frommer travel-guide empire. Not bad for something that essentially began as a young soldier trying to escape the barracks whenever possible.

The book also introduced me to writers I knew little or nothing about. Pico Iyer was the biggest discovery. He comes across as thoughtful, curious and unusually sympathetic. The sort of traveler interested less in conquering destinations than understanding what they do to us. His interview alone sent me looking for his books, which is perhaps the best compliment a collection like this can receive.

Taken together, A Sense of Place is an enjoyable gathering of people who have spent much of their lives wandering around the planet and then trying to explain what they saw.

There is, however, some repetition. The interviews were assembled around 2004, so September 11, the Iraq War and the Bush administration inevitably drift through many of the conversations. These were unavoidable subjects at the time, particularly for people whose profession involved crossing borders and observing cultures, but read consecutively they can make certain themes feel like recurring passengers who refuse to get off the train.

For that reason, this probably isn’t a book to devour in one sitting. Read an interview. Put the book down. Go somewhere. Come back. Read another. Which, come to think of it, is probably the appropriate way to read a book about travel writers anyway.